Beruflich Dokumente
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RICHARD MANSBACH is a professor of political science at Iowa State University. He is the author of Global
Politics in a Changing World: A Reader, Remapping Global Politics: History’s Revenge and Future Shock, and In
Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics.
Europe’s wars of religion, and especially the Thirty Years’ War, settled (at least
temporarily) the relationship between religion and the state. The evolution of the
sovereign state accelerated during Europe’s wars of religion, which followed the
Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Peace of
Augsburg in 1555, which ended war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the
Schmalkaldic League, established peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Prot-
estants and decreed an end to war based on religion among the polities of the Holy
The most influential of the Protestant reformers was John Calvin, trained in theol-
ogy and civil law in France. He, like Zwingli, went well beyond Luther in advocat-
ing theocratic authority. Luther enjoyed considerable support among German
princes like Frederick, elector of Saxony, and in An Open Letter to the Christian
Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate, he
appealed to their desire for political independence from both the pope and the
CONCLUSION
Calvinism would then make its way to the New World with the Puritans. Its legacy
continues to motivate many U.S. evangelicals in their efforts to infuse politics and
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government with religion. Fundamentalism, after all, is not unique to Islam and
can be seen today in evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, and even the
revival of Hinduism in India.
But the most important, violent contemporary struggle to determine the
relationship between church and civil government is being waged within the Is-
lamic umma. It remains for Muslims to determine what sort of political commu-
nity they will accept. Arab societies, for example, are torn by the tension between
the state and transnational Islam. Michael Barnett argues that, in the first iteration
of the struggle between these two estates, advocates of national sovereignty in the
Middle East initially triumphed, insofar as interaction among Arab governments
created new “state identities, roles, and interests” that produced “stable expecta-
tions and shared norms”16 associated with sovereignty. But “sovereignty is not per-
manently anchored,” and “Arab leaders must continually work to reproduce the
state’s sovereignty, its domestic and international authority, and the distinction
between domestic and international space. The failure of statist ideologies has res-
urrected primordial, ethnic, and, most famously, religious identities,”17 which in
turn threaten state sovereignty. “While Islamic movements may or may not be
compatible with juridical sovereignty,” declares Barnett, “they do challenge the
internal sovereignty of many Arab states.”18
114 NOTES
1. James A. Caporaso, “Changes in the Westphalian Order: Territory, Public Authority, and Sover-
eignty,” International Studies Review 2, no. 2 (2000): 1.
2. Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery,1956), 60.
3. Hitti, The Arabs, 36.
4. Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1960), 366.
5. Hitti, The Arabs, 55.
6. Caporaso, “Changes in the Westphalian Order,” 11.
7. George P. Shultz, “A Changed World,” (lecture, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 11 February
2004). A condensed version of this speech can be found at http://www.fpri.org/enotes/
20040322.americawar.shultz.changedworld.html
8. The egalitarian bent of Islam probably owes much to the egalitarian nature of the Bedouin society in
which it arose. See Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), 28-29.
9. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 88.
10. Martin Luther, Open Letter to The Christian Nobility of the German Nation, 1520, http://
etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-reldem?id=LutNobi.xml&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/
english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all.
11. See Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International
Relations (London: Verso, 2003). Teschke argues that the modern state only emerged with nineteenth-
century industrialization.
12. See Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999). Krasner argues persuasively that sovereignty has always been honored in the breach.
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